Tag Archives | Ireland

Irish City Hosting The G8 Summit Gets Fake Storefronts To Create Appearance Of Prosperity

By on June 1, 2013 in News 0

ireland

Located in a region devastated by austerity and the global financial crisis, fascinatingly, Enniskillen will be turned into a movie-set-style simulation of a thriving town when global leaders pass through for the G8 Summit next month. Via PRI’s The World, Irish Times reporter Dan Keenan says:

These are basically empty shops that are being now made to look as if they are thriving businesses – what they’ve done is they have filled the shop front window with photographs in the windows of what was the business before it went bankrupt or closed. In other words, grocery shops, butcher shops, pharmacies, you name it. It’s an attempt to make the place look as positive as possible for the visiting G8 leaders and their entourages, and it’s really tried to put a mask on a recession that has really hit this part of Ireland really very badly indeed.

This initiative is stemming from the Foreign Office in London.

… Read the rest

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Report: Thousands Of Irish Women Were Enslaved In Catholic Laundries Which Ended In 1996

By on February 8, 2013 in News 6

They were being punished for being orphans or single mothers, for committing petty crimes, or being perceived as rebellious in some way. Via ABC News:

Ireland’s government oversaw workhouses run by Catholic nuns that once held thousands of women and teenage girls in unpaid labor and usually against their will, a fact-finding report concluded Tuesday, establishing state involvement in the country’s infamous Magdalene Laundries for the first time.

Opposition leaders demanded that Prime Minister Enda Kenny offer an official apology for the state’s failure to enforce labor laws and human rights standards in the 10 Magdalene Laundries, and to pledge to establish a taxpayer-funded compensation program for survivors. The report found that 10,012 women were committed to the workhouses from 1922 to the closure of the last two laundries in 1996.

The government since 2002 has paid more than $1.3 billion to more than 13,000 people who suffered abuse in other Catholic-run workhouses and orphanages but explicitly excluded former Magdalene residents, contending these were privately run institutions with negligible state involvement.

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Strange History: Did Native Americans Land in Ireland?

By on November 19, 2012 in News 14

Another possible case of Pre-Columbian Trans-Atlantic travel?

Picture: Edward Curtis (PD)

Via Strange History:

One of the most dramatic pieces of evidence for a pre-Columbian crossing of the Atlantic is to be found in a single Latin marginalia, that is some words scribbled into the margin of a book. The sentence in question appears in a copy of the Historia rerum ubique gestarum by Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini which was published in Venice in 1477. In that work Piccolomini discusses the arrival of Indians in Europe blown from across the Atlantic at a date when America was unknown to Europeans (another post another day). Next to this passage a reader has written in Latin the following extraordinary words:

Homines de catayo versus oriens venierunt. Nos vidimus multa notabilia et specialiter in galuei ibernie virum et uxorem in duabus lignis areptis ex mirabili persona.

Keep reading…you’ll never guess who scribbled in the book.… Read the rest

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Catholic Priests Oppose ‘Report Pedophilia’ Bill in Ireland

By on April 30, 2012 in News 11

Claire O’Sullivan and Ann Cahill write in the Irish Examiner:

Justice Minister Alan Shatter reiterated that everyone, including priests, were obliged to report child sex abuse and other offences, including white collar crime, to the gardaí, even if they hear about it in the confessional.

The minister described the issue as a media obsession and said priests had been obliged to provide gardaí with information about a whole series of crimes since the 1998 Offences Against the State Amendment Act.

Nobody had raised any question about this or the 2011 Criminal Justice Act that placed the same obligation on the whole community, including priests, to assist gardaí with information.

The confessional was a diversion from the real issue, which had nothing to do with the confessional but with the fact that sexual abuse of children by clergy had been known about by religious orders and leaders as a result of parents, victims and others telling them, outside of the confessional.

… Read the rest

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Irishman Dies Of Spontaneous Combustion (So Rules A Court of Law)

By on September 24, 2011 in News 9

TorchA most bizarre find from Annalee Newitz of io9.com:

A man in Galway, Ireland apparently died of spontaneous combustion last year in December. At least, according to a court ruling this week. Michael Faherty’s death had been a mystery because coroners and police couldn’t explain how the fire that killed him only seemed to have burned the man and his immediate surroundings.

Spontaneous combustion occurs when a person suddenly catches on fire without any external source of fire causing the blaze. There have been only a few hundred cases recorded throughout the world. The Irish Times reports: West Galway corner Dr Ciarán McLoughlin said he had never encountered such a case in the 25 years that he had been investigating deaths in the region …

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BO Turns on the Charm: U.S. President Leaves Ireland Early for An Audience with British Monarch

By on May 24, 2011 in News 0

Guess Crown counts for more than kin with some people. From Anissa Hadaddi at the International Business Times:

A dense cloud of ash from an Icelandic volcano was being blown toward Scotland yesterday. While airlines started to cancel their flights, U.S. President Barack Obama was forced to cut short his visit to Ireland as fears of disruptions similar to those engendered by the Icelandic Eyjafjallajökull eruption in April 2010 mounted.

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Taliban Terry Arrested In Ireland For Obama Death Threat

By on May 13, 2011 in News 19

Is there a nuttier Irishman than Khalid Kelly, a/k/a Taliban Terry? He’s one of the main characters in Stephen Marshall’s acclaimed documentary Holy Wars (see trailer below), and is now vowing revenge for the killing of Osama bin Laden. Via AP:

Police arrested Ireland’s most notorious Muslim convert Thursday over his reported death threats against President Barack Obama.

Police said Khalid Kelly, a 44-year-old dubbed “Taliban Terry” by Dubliners, was arrested at his Dublin residence on suspicion of threatening to kill the U.S. leader. He could be held for up to three days before being charged or released.

The arrest came 10 days before Obama’s arrival in Ireland and four days after a British newspaper, the Sunday Mirror, printed an interview with Kelly. He is Ireland’s most outspoken supporter of al-Qaida and its slain founder, Osama bin Laden.

Kelly was quoted as telling the newspaper that he expected al-Qaida to kill Obama during his visit to Ireland…

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Money Is Not Real

By on November 26, 2010 in News 34

Euro CoinsFrom A Tiny Revolution:

So, the world’s elites have decided to focus all their efforts on generating another Great Depression. Their cunning plan is to destroy their countries in order to save them:

As Europe’s major economies focus on belt-tightening, they are following the path of Ireland. But the once thriving nation is struggling, with no sign of a rapid turnaround in sight.

Nearly two years ago, an economic collapse forced Ireland to cut public spending and raise taxes, the type of austerity measures that financial markets are now pressing on most advanced industrial nations…

Rather than being rewarded for its actions, though, Ireland is being penalized. Its downturn has certainly been sharper than if the government had spent more to keep people working. Lacking stimulus money, the Irish economy shrank 7.1 percent last year and remains in recession…

[David Stronge] moved to reinvent himself, returning to school with thousands of other Irish, in hopes that a higher degree would lead to better prospects.

… Read the rest

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